Another article from Hannibal at Ars Techinca, this time covering the up and coming Cell proccesor. If you are curious just what this chip is all about, then get a fresh cup of coffee and dig in!

"The Cell proccesor consists of a general-purpose POWERPC processor core connected to eight special-purpose DSP cores. These DSP cores, which IBM calls "synergistic processing elements" (SPE), but I'm going to call "SIMD processing elements" (SPE) because "synergy" is a dumb word, are really the heart of the entire Cell concept. IBM introduced the basic architecture of the SPE today, and they're going to introduce the overall architecture of the complete Cell system in a session tomorrow morning.

In this brief overview, I'm first going to talk in some general terms about the Cell approach â€” what it is, what it's like, what's behind it, etc. â€” before doing an information dump at the end of the article for more technical readers to chew on and debate."